This work is part of a new series of works on paper by William Tucker – drawings in charcoal, ink and watercolour, inspired by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘A Bronze Head’. It’s one of his last poems, written in 1937, at a moment very like the present. It starts:

‘Here at right of the entrance this bronze head
Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.’

And the poem ends:

‘Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.’

Tucker wrote it out on the first page of a new 9 x 12 drawing book and started work on the next page in charcoal, then in watercolour. He then closed the book so that the blank page opposite took the impression of the charcoal and the wet paint and then developed that into another drawing, and continued to do that using ink, chalk, pastel, graphite and other materials, working each one separately some over many sessions, some just a single impression. They’re on the theme of the head – they are heads that face you, but Tucker is not trying to identify an individual, as with the sculptures. It’s more to do with the process - random heads emerge from the materials and the process, as he works. Tucker does them much faster in shorter sessions, but then comes back and reworks them, and sometimes hardly touches them at all. Sometimes he overworks them by trying to define them, rather than simply accepting what has appeared. It’s not a matter of ‘finishing’ them and giving each one a name or a title; just ‘A Bronze Head’ and a number.

Text above taken from interview with Jon Wood and edited.